Nietzsche, Artistic Intoxication, and the Overcoming of Nihilism: the Body as an Ontology of Practice

a more authentic set of values. The ugliest man experiences a visceral sentiment of spiritual nakedness that panics him into seeking a false compensation to the collapse of traditional values. He wants to escape nihilism without overturning old metaphysical habits. He now relies on the values offered through the practices of commercialized mass culture, social-utopian movements, political parties, and other secular value systems that pursue the will to truth.# Nietzsche writes, “the ways of self-narcotization.- deep down: not knowing whither. Emptiness” (WP 29). The will to action of the ugliest man is basically a form of negation, not positive construction, for he further pursues the metaphysical faith of the ascetic outlook; he acts on the basis of the notion that the traditional values have failed to produce the absolute truths that should guide our life. He expresses a will to impose on the lives of others meaning schemes that actually degrade their personal needs, impulses, and styles of life. This debilitating character in the perspective of the ugliest man is formative to nihilism: the death of God as the clash of competing, reactive, secular perspectives on human existence.

Ironically, then, the ugliest man, a symbol of the modern subject who reacts against God’s pity, embraces a mode of existence that inspires revulsion in some of us owing to its ugliness, that is, the character of the contradiction that plague his will. Nietzsche writes, “ugliness signifies the decadence [read decline] of a type, contradiction and lack of co-ordination among the inner desires-signifies a decline in organizing strength, in ’will,’ to speak psychologically” (WP 800). Contradiction in the basic impulses of the self points to an

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